RowSet interface is another key interface from JDBC API, which extends the ResultSet interface to provide support for the JavaBean component model. Along with convenient methods to set connection parameters e.g. setUrl(), setUsername(), setPassword() and setCommand(), it also defines getters and setters for different data types e.g. getLong() and setLong(). Another feature of RowSet is that it supports event listeners. You can attach listeners to RowSet object to listen for events, much like Observer design pattern. RowSet acts as Subject and notifies Observer on events like change in cursor location, change in row or change in the entire RowSet. There are two types of RowSet available in JDBC 4.1 API, connected and disconnected.

Are you stuck with your coding because you have a byte array and next method in chain needs an InputStream? don't worry Java has solution for that, You can use ByteArrayInputStream to convert byte array to InputStream in Java. This class takes a byte array as source and since it's a sub-class of InputStream, you can easily pass this to any method, which accepts InputStream as parameter. Though most of the API like JDBC and File API allows you to read directly from InputStream, because this allows you to process an arbitrary content with limited heap space. You should take advantage of this and directly read from InputStream instead of getting byte array and then converting them back to InputStream.

In order to make proper use of State and Strategy design Pattern in Core Java application, its important for a Java developer to clearly understand difference between them. Though both State and Strategy design patterns has similar structure, and both of them are based upon Open closed design principle, represents 'O' from SOLID design principles, they are totally different on there intent. Strategy design pattern in Java is used to encapsulate related set of algorithms to provide runtime flexibility to client. Client can choose any algorithm at runtime, without changing Context class, which uses Strategy object. Some of the popular example of Strategy pattern is writing code, which uses algorithms e.g. encryption, compression or sorting algorithm.

It's been almost a month Java 8 is released and I am sure all of you are exploring new features of JDK 8. But, before you completely delve into Java 8, it’s time to revisit some of the cool features introduced on Java 7. If you remember, Java 6 was nothing on feature, it was all about JVM changes and performance, but JDK 7 did introduced some cool features which improved developer's day to day task. Why I am writing this post now? Why I am talking about Java 1. 7, when everybody is talking about Java 8? Well I think, not all Java developers are familiar with changes introduced in JDK 7, and what time can be better to revisit earlier version than before welcoming a new version.

If you have used Hibernate with JPA and using annotation to declare your entity bean then you might have seen this confusing error called "org.hibernate.MappingException: Unknown entity". This error message is so misleading that you could easily lose anywhere between few minutes to few hours looking at wrong places. I was using Spring 3 and Hibernate 3.6 when I got this error,which occurs when addEntity() method was executed. I checked everything, from Spring configuration file applicationContext.xml, Hibernate config file, my Entity class and DAO class to see whether my Entity class is annotated or not, but I was still getting this error message. After some goggling I eventually find that, it was an incorrect import which was causing this error.

Before going to explain specific difference between FileInputStream and FileReader in Java, I would like to state fundamental difference between an InputStream and a Reader in Java, and when to use InputStream and when to go for Reader. Actually, Both InputStream and Reader are abstractions to read data from source, which can be either file or socket, but main difference between them is, InputStreamis used to read binary data, while Reader is used to read text data, precisely Unicode characters. So what is difference between binary and text data? well everything you read is essentially bytes, but to convert a byte to text, you need a character encoding scheme. Reader classes uses character encoding to decode bytes and return characters to caller.

From Java 5 onwards, we have a for-each loop for iterating over collection and array in Java. For each loop allows you to traverse over collection without keeping track of index like traditional for loop, or calling hasNext() method in while loop using Iterator or ListIterator. For-each loop indeed simplified iteration over any Collection or array in Java, but not every Java programmer is aware of some useful details of for-each loop, which we will see in this tutorial. Unlike other popular items from Java 5 release alias Generics, Autoboxing and variable arguments, Java developers tend to use for-each loop more often than any other feature, but when asked about how does advanced foreach loop works or what is basic requirement of using a Collection in for-each loop, not everyone can answer. This small tutorial and example aims to bridge that gap by going through some interesting foreach loop puzzles. So, without any further delay let's see our first puzzle on Java 5 for-each loop.

If you are working in Hibernate framework, then you know that one of the key feature of Hibernate is "lazy initialization", which allows framework to lazily initialize dependencies, relationship or association lazily from database on need basis. For example, if you are dealing with User object, which has relationship with Permission object like one user can have multiple permissions, then Hibernate may choose not to initialize the collection which holds all permissions at the time it initialized User object and instead returns a proxy object. At this point, if you close your session and letter tries to access an attribute from Permission object, you will get "org.hibernate.LazyInitializationException: could not initialize proxy - no Session in Hibernate".

We often need to replace line terminator characters, also known as line breaks e.g. new line \n and carriage return \r with different characters. One of the common case is to replace all line breaks with empty space in order to concatenate multiple lines into one long line of String. In order to replace line breaks, you must know line terminator or new line characters for that platform. For example, In Windows operating system e.g. Windows 7 and 8, lines are terminated by \n\r also known as CR+LF, while in Unix environment e.g. Linux or Solaris line terminator is \n, known as line feed LF. You can also get line terminator pragmatically by using Java system property line.terminator.

JUnit is the most popular framework for unit testing Java code. Unit testing is used to test a single programming unit e.g. a class or a method, in-fact many Java developer write unit test on per method basis. Stub and Mock objects are two concepts which helps during unit testing, they are not real object, but act like real object for unit testing purpose. By the way, If you are absolutely beginner in Java Unit testing then you can see this post to learn how to create JUnit test in Eclipse. Coming back to Stubs and Mocks, One reason of using Stub and Mock object is dependency of one unit into another. Since in real world, most unit doesn't work in isolation, they use dependent class and object to complete there task.